18 October 2015 2:04 AM

There aren’t enough public sector houses to go round. Would it then make sense to demolish all those houses and make everyone except the rich live in tower blocks?

Of course not. Yet this mad principle – that if everyone cannot have something, nobody can have it – governs our education policy, and no major party disagrees with it.

Half a century ago, everyone agreed that secondary modern schools were not working. Everybody knew that the technical schools, promised in 1944, had not been built.

The one good part of the system was the grammar schools. They were enabling a wonderful revolution in which the very best education was flung open to anyone who could pass an exam, and our obsolete class system was finally being overthrown by unfettered talent.

Alongside them, and based on the same kind of selection by ability, was a brilliant scheme known as the direct grant, by which scores of the finest private day schools in the world took in large numbers of state school pupils free of charge.

Girls and boys from grammar and direct grant schools were storming Oxford and Cambridge by the end of the 1960s, elbowing aside public school products without any special concessions or quotas.

The sane response to this would have been to build the technical schools (which we still badly need), improve the secondary moderns and encourage and expand the grammar schools and the direct grant schools.

The actual response of Tory and Labour governments was to destroy hundreds of superb grammar schools, some of them centuries old, and abolish the direct grant system. You could fill several books with these follies, and I have.

One of the many crazy results was the revival of the dying private schools, which held open their ornate gateways to paying refugees from the comprehensive madness. The comprehensives were so bad and so disorderly that basic competence and order could be sold as top quality for fees of £25,000 a year.

It was a typical example of our governing class’s habit of finding the things that are healthy, good and beneficial, and destroying them.

As it happens, this particular mistake is reversible, and has been corrected in recent times. When communism collapsed in East Germany, thousands of parents petitioned their new free state governments to restore the grammar schools which their Stalinist rulers had ruthlessly replaced with comprehensives.

Comprehensive schools, as too few understand, have never been designed to improve education. On the contrary, their inventor, Graham Savage, actually admitted that his plan would hold back bright children.

They are a revolutionary scheme designed to enforce equality of outcome. That is why it is against the law to open any new grammar schools, and why this week’s odd legal fiddle in Sevenoaks is causing so much fuss.

But a tiny rump of grammar schools continues to exist. They are so much better than the comprehensives which replaced them that even Labour politicians, such as Harriet Harman, have readily endured derision and career damage to send their children to them.

This is why the remaining few grammars are so besieged. Their enemies repeatedly lie about this. Because a tiny few oversubscribed schools are dominated by the middle class, they claim that a national system, available to all, would have the same problem. This obviously isn’t true, yet they keep on repeating the falsehood.

Why can’t we restore the lost grammar schools when huge numbers of parents want them and they are proven to work?

It is time for these lies to end. As things are, state schools are rigidly and cruelly selective, but their pupils are picked on the basis of their parents’ wealth and ability to live in the right catchment area, or their public piety – or both.

The rich and powerful (including many Tory and Labour politicians and some of the keenest campaigners against grammars) play a constant Game Of Homes to lever and wangle their offspring into the best postcodes and the best ‘comprehensives’. Many of these are so socially selective that they have hardly any poor pupils receiving free school meals, though you never hear this fact mentioned.

Why do we put up with it? Why can’t we restore the lost grammar schools when huge numbers of parents want them and they are proven to work?

How dare we laugh at the Germans for being subservient and obedient, when we tolerate this stupid, dishonest policy, which wrecks the hopes of thousands each year and madly wastes the talents of this country?

What's so saintly about destroying a happy family?

It was absurd to deny votes to women for so long. But the fashionable new film Suffragette is deeply misleading about how this came about, and rather nasty. Did Meryl Streep know what she was doing when she lent her stardom to this production?

It makes a saint out of a (fictional) working-class woman, played by Carey Mulligan, who ruthlessly destroys her small, happy family for the sake of an abstraction, ignoring the pleas and kindly advice of good men.

And it makes a heroine out of another fanatic, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who is in fact a terrorist, and helps to blow up a Cabinet Minister’s home.

I hope the makers are not prosecuted under the absurd and unBritish 2006 Terrorism Act, which created the offence of ‘Glorifying Terrorism’, though some may think that is what their film does.

There is quite a lot of evidence that the militant suffragettes actually damaged the cause they so noisily pursued. The film doesn’t even mention the First World War, which did far more to bring about votes for women than hunger strikes, broken windows or arson.

David Cameron’s twin bungles in Libya and Syria, where his ignorant interference helped cause the huge migrant wave, have transformed the EU referendum campaign.

Cameron's pro-EU argument has been so weakened by the migrant crisis that a vote to leave Europe may now acually be possible

He has been doubly unlucky. First, he unexpectedly won the Election with a majority, so he has to keep his promise of a vote. Second, a largely indifferent public has spotted the connection between EU membership and our undefended borders.

This means that a vote to leave is actually possible, which I must admit I hadn’t thought it was. The pro-EU argument has always been feeble and dishonest, as the comically useless launch of the ‘Stay-in’ campaign last week showed. And the Prime Minister’s ‘renegotiations’ were always hopeless. But now this is becoming painfully obvious to those who would normally not have cared.

I just hope that, if we do decide to leave, we have enough strength and wealth to act as a nation once again. Our national muscles have shrivelled and wasted in the 43 years since Westminster was turned into a glorified county council.

And we still have no major political party that supports national independence. So will we know what to do with it when we get it?

10 March 2013 12:23 AM

Almost all scandals have consequences. The law is changed or people are punished. Only one enormous scandal goes on happening again and again, and nothing is ever done about it.

It is the way in which our new elite seek selective education for their own children, while ruthlessly denying it to everyone else. Nicholas Clegg is the latest of these revolting hypocrites, and he too will get away with it.

So have Anthony Blair, Diane Abbott, Harriet Harman and Ruth Kelly, and several others who have never been publicly found out.

This unpunished disgrace has been going on since the political class abolished the grammar schools, a terrible act of vandalism which is still damaging the country every day, 48 years after it began. I cannot understand why the British people have put up with it for so long.

You might think the elite did this because they at least thought it would produce better schools. On the contrary, the idea’s inventor, Sir Graham Savage, admitted from the start that it would hold back the ablest children.

He just thought it would be more ‘democratic’. That has always been the point of it, to create a more socialist society, to impose compulsory equality of outcome.

It is a million times more important, in the Left’s armoury, than nationalisation or even taxation. It is Labour’s real Clause Four, never abandoned and now adopted by the Tories and the Lib Dems as well, as their pledge of loyalty to the socialist state they all support.

Why else is it that a perfectly sensible idea – selection by ability – is actually banned by law from our state schools? Imagine if businesses, or the Armed Forces, football, cricket or Olympic teams were also barred by law from choosing on the grounds of ability. Everyone would think it mad. Yet, when the same unhinged rule is applied to schools, all the major parties agree that it should be so, and remain so for ever.

The barmy idea – that egalitarian state education is in some way noble – infects the Tories too. The grimly politically correct Home Secretary, Theresa May, tried to pretend she had a comprehensive schooling, when in fact she went to a private convent school and then to a grammar, which went comprehensive later.

And the Prime Minister and his Education Secretary – quite able to afford school fees – wangle their children into an oversubscribed and distant Church primary. This is supposed to make them look like men of the people. In fact all they have done is to deprive some poor families of places at one of the few genuinely good state schools in the area. How is thatnoble, exactly?

The same is true of Mr Clegg, who last week more or less got away with announcing that he would be sending his son to the London Oratory, a Roman Catholic school which is a comprehensive school much in the way that 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terrace house.

Being hugely oversubscribed, and having a religious character, the Oratory is really a selective school. It has to be. But the selection is subtle and hard to penetrate. Most who are rejected will never really know why others were preferred to them. And so it benefits the well-off, the influential and (it seems) the politically well-connected.

The same is true of several London schools favoured by the Left-wing elite, superb, unofficially selective academies with tiny catchment areas that most people cannot possibly afford to live in. Some of the smuggest leftist power couples in this country have spent fortunes buying their way into these catchment areas, while pretending that they have not bought privilege for their young.

Did Mr Clegg’s spin doctors soften us up for this shabby moment? You decide. We were told that Mr Clegg was thinking of schooling his children privately, nowadays regarded as a terrible sin.

So, when he didn’t do that, it was reported as a sort of anti-climax. It is nothing of the sort. It is a contemptuous smack in the face for tens of thousands of families who have to take what they are jolly well given, a bog-standard comprehensive which will offer their children no way up.

I lived for a while in the Soviet Union, an officially equal society. It had exactly the same system we now have – official equality and secret elite privilege. In the end, everyone became so disgusted by this arrangement that they refused to tolerate it any more. Why do we continue to stomach it?

We promise freedom – and deliver chaos

Two years ago, Syria was an imperfect but reasonably happy place. Most people got on with their neighbours, went to work, raised their children and – almost uniquely in the Middle East – there was harmony among rival religious groups.

Now it is a war-ravaged hell, in which blameless people have been bankrupted, had their homes destroyed and been forced to become refugees. The red-eyed monster of religious hatred has been awakened and stalks the streets and villages doing dreadful crimes, which will of course be avenged with new crimes.

We, that is to say the British Government, helped to achieve this filthy thing. I suspect we did it because we expect some sort of favours in return from the fanatical despots who run Saudi Arabia, and who hate the Damascus government for being the wrong sort of Muslims.

Now the abject William Hague plans to make it even worse by stepping up our supplies to the rebels. Mr Hague’s pitiful performance in government is so hard to bear precisely because he is an intelligent and informed person who ought to know better.

But once again, are there no MPs willing to defy the official line, to say that, however bad the Assad government may be, war and chaos are worse for the Syrian people, and that we cannot possibly claim to be the friends of freedom in the Arab world if we ally ourselves with the Saudis?

Speak now, please, before it grows any worse.

A big dose of drug firm hype

In a way it is a surprise that there are not more Hollywood films about ‘antidepressant’ drugs, a huge revolution in American and European medicine which has changed the way people think and behave, and which is one of the most lucrative industries in human history.

Now comes Side Effects, which at first seems to be sceptical about these controversial pills and their, er, side effects. But (plot spoiler here) the drugs end up being vindicated and the doubters end up looking silly. How interesting. How did that happen?

You might like to know that The New York Times wrote back in January: ‘From the beginning, Side Effects was constructed to avoid potential conflicts with the giant companies that make and sell real drugs.’

The writer of the script, Scott Burns, told the NYT: ‘I spent more time on the phone with my lawyer on this than on all my other movies combined.’ I can believe that.

If drug ‘addicts’ can
give up their drugs by using self-control, then ‘addiction’ doesn’t
exist. They can stop if they want to. Obvious, isn’t it? Not to my old
foe Russell Brand, now pontificating grandly on the subject in the
Spectator, the Guardian and the Sun. This alleged comedian, in his
designer rags, is fast becoming the voice of the Establishment. Perhaps
the Tory Party – in its endless quest to be fashionable – could skip
another generation, and make him its next leader.